


unfurl and show every color

by patrokla



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: M/M, Oysters Rockefeller AU, Past Child Abuse, Psychological Trauma, basically an AU from the hale appleman cinematic universe, excessive secret garden references, how to tag...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 09:03:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18635023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: Eliot has never seen the sun.He wants to.





	unfurl and show every color

**Author's Note:**

> Right, first things first: this is an AU of a short film Hale Appleman was in called "Oysters Rockefeller," which you can watch [here](https://vimeo.com/27677060). My hope is that you will be able to read this without needing to watch the film, but you may want to watch it anyway. I'm really fascinated by it, and think it could fit into quite a lot of Magicians fics in a lot of different ways - but I thought I'd start with a straightforward AU first.
> 
> Title and an excerpt from Frances Hodgson Burnett's _The Secret Garden_ , which has some great passages about magic that make me want to keep writing in this universe where Eliot has read it. The unnamed film Eliot remembers is a Charlie Chaplin film called "A Woman," which you can find around the internet.
> 
> Warnings: All the attendant warnings that come with having been locked up in a house for your entire life. Abuse, neglect, implied character death, tropes.

The house Eliot was born in creaks and groans at night, especially during the winter. As a child he’d been terrified by the noises, running to his aunt’s bedroom most nights out of terror and loneliness. But now, after twenty-four years, he takes comfort in the noise. His family is usually a quiet family; the house speaks the loudest of any of them.  
  
Sometimes Eliot speaks back. The beams in the roof crackle and Eliot asks them if they’d ever seen the sun, before the roof tiles covered them up. The fourth step on the narrow stairs squeaks when he steps on it, like a mouse, and so he talks to the mouse family that might be living under the stairs.  
  
“I hope I didn’t make your sitting room dusty,” Eliot says once, picturing a whole house inside of the stairs, a house inside of his house, with mother mouse and son mouse watching old films on a tiny projector as aunt mouse embroiders flowers on shirt sleeves.  
  
“Eliot, who are you talking to?” His mother sounds angry and afraid, as she always does when she doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing. Or maybe something else, maybe something different, but he doesn’t have the words for it.  
  
“No one, Mother,” he says, always, not wanting to betray the possible mice. “Only myself.”  
  
—  
  
Eliot doesn’t like birthdays. He used to, when he was young, but lately his birthdays have ended in arguments between Aunt Zelda and Mother like he’s never heard before, arguments that begin as furious whispers in the foyer or the hallway outside his bedroom, and continue late and loud into the night.  
  
Their arguments are about him and his birthday, he can tell that much, but the details are still difficult to make out. His mother always says he’s only a boy, and Aunt Zelda says he’s 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 years old, Dorothy, when will you let him grow up?    
  
—  
  
In the films they watch, there are sometimes boys. More often, there are men, and women. Once there is a man who pretends to be a woman - he puts on a dress and shaves his mustache, and he smiles at men like women usually do. The men even like him, until they realize - and then they don’t, and the man becomes a man again.  
  
Eliot hasn’t seen that film in years. It had been a birthday present a very long time ago, a rare import from Outside that was new because he’d never watched it before. He had laughed, and Aunt Zelda had laughed, and Mother had laughed, and then one day he’d stopped laughing so much and started to think, and watch, and Mother had done the same, and then the film had been gone.  
  
But there are other films, most of them by Grandfather, and in these films the men stay men and the women stay women, and that, Eliot surmises, is how the world must work.  
  
—  
  
Lately, his mother has been watching _Damsel_. She plays it every night, and Eliot sometimes watches it again during the day, head tilted, trying to understand why she likes it.  
  
_Damsel_ has a hero, a villain, and a damsel - the Damsel. The damsel has dark hair and big eyes, and she lives at the edge of a great forest. One day the villain sees her from his castle in the forest, and takes her. _You will be mine!_ the villain tells her, and she shouts and kicks him, so he ties her up and puts her in a dungeon. It’s there that the hero finds the damsel. _I will save you_ , the hero tells her, _you are my damsel_. And he does. He kills the villain, and takes the damsel away, cutting away the ropes around her and then lifting her up and carrying her out of the dungeon and away from the castle in the woods. _The End_.  
  
It’s one of Grandfather’s first films, and Eliot privately thinks it’s not his best, although he could never tell Mother that. It’s too short, and Eliot doesn’t understand how the hero knows the damsel, or how he finds her. He asks Aunt Zelda, and she says that sometimes love is like that, knowing and understanding when there’s no reason that you should.  
  
—  
  
The house does not have windows. Eliot realizes this late, embarrassingly late, and only because of a book. He still remembers the day, sitting on the duvet in new trousers, stiff with starch, reading _The Secret Garden_ for the second or third time and wishing that he had a garden, that he had a friend, two friends, even, and feeling very sorry for himself. In the book, Mary had finally stopped feeling sorry for herself, at least temporarily, and she’d - Eliot remembers, she’d woken up and seen the sun pouring through the blinds:

 

 

> “She drew up the blinds and opened the window itself and a great waft of fresh, scented air blew in upon her. The moor was blue and the whole world looked as if something Magic had happened to it. Mary put her hand out of the window and held it in the sun.  
>    
>  “It’s warm - warm!” she said.”

Eliot has never seen the sun. It’s a fact like a heavy stone in his pocket, growing smooth and worn from all the times he’s run his fingers over it. He wonders if it would be warm like it was for Mary. He wonders if there are moors outside his home, if they are blue or red or every shade of color all at once. He thinks maybe that’s how the entire world is, colors and Magic everywhere, and that’s what makes it dangerous.

Mother likes to remind him that the world is what made Grandfather kill himself.

“It became too complicated,” she says a dozen times, a hundred times, a thousand times, “and there was no place in it for a man with a simple, good heart.”

“And that’s why we stay here,” Eliot continues dutifully, “to preserve a simpler time.”

“And to preserve our hearts,” she finishes, cradling his cheek.

He smiles at her, the closing card for a scene in black and white. _The End_.

—

Eliot is sitting in the foyer, idly pushing a wooden car and indulging in the feeling of grainy wood rolling under his hands, when something flutters in from Outside. A folded piece of paper, slipped under the door and with enough force that it makes it under the second door, the one with all of the locks. The one Eliot is not allowed to touch.

But Mother had never said anything about him touching papers, from the Outside or otherwise, and he grabs the paper with a kind of frenzied greed, looking at the words too quickly to understand them, and then slowing down and looking again and again.

"The Seven Seas," the paper announces, in a square, ugly script that doesn’t match the way the words sound as Eliot whispers them to himself. _The Seven Seas, the Seven Seas_ , the Sssss sliding on his tongue, the Ea stretching his mouth.

And then all the words below that, naming foods that Eliot knows and more that he doesn’t, and one in particular catches his eye, a mix of old and new.

Oysters Rockefeller.

—

“I want Oysters Rockefeller for Grandfather’s dinner tomorrow,” he tells his mother that evening, curled over in the tub so she can scrub his back. His legs are getting too long for the tub, really, but it’s the only one they have, so he wraps his arms around his legs and rests his head on his knees, feeling the water slowly cool around him.

Mother stops scrubbing abruptly, and he looks back at her.

“Oysters Rockefeller,” she says slowly, smoke curling up from her cigarette, “now where did you hear of that?”

“I read it,” he says, which isn’t even a lie, is it?

She hums, but not with much suspicion, and eventually says, “Your grandfather liked oysters,” and that’s that.

Or so he thinks. Later, and not even that much later, he’ll realize otherwise.

—

“Do you like oysters?” he asks Aunt Zelda the next morning, as she wraps her thin measuring tape around one thigh and then the other.

“Oh, I couldn’t say,” she replies, but she wrinkles her nose a little as she says it, so Eliot thinks she must not like them.

“It’s been a long time since I ate oysters,” she murmurs after a few minutes, putting down the measuring tape to write down the numbers with a tiny pencil. “A long time ago, when I - well, I was being courted by a young man, a nice man.”

His mother, sitting in her chair on the other side of the room, snorts at that.

“He was a cad, Zelda,” she says, and Eliot watches as Aunt Zelda’s shoulders curl in on themselves a little, like he does in the bath.

He looks around as she keeps measuring, marking his shorts and occasionally putting a pin in with no rhyme or reason that he can tell. There’s a picture he can’t remember seeing before on the shelf, grainy in a heavy black wooden frame. The Damsel.

“Aunt Zelda,” he says, not even meaning to, mesmerized by the damsel’s face, her relief at seeing the hero, “Am I a man?”

He watches her, but she doesn’t look up at him, still measuring and marking.

“It takes a lot to be a man,” she says quietly.

“Like trousers,” he quips, and it startles a smile out of her.

“You don’t need trousers,” his mother says mildly, and he and Aunt Zelda go still. “You’re just a boy.”

—

That afternoon, someone knocks on the front door. Eliot cracks open the door to the sitting room, crouching in his shorts and dinner jacket, and watches as his mother unlocks the locks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. She peeks through the door Eliot isn’t allowed to open. He thinks it must be Barbara, the woman who brings groceries, here on the wrong day, but his mother slams the door shut immediately.

“You have the wrong house,” she says to the door, and Eliot can just barely hear a voice come from Outside.

“Are you Dorothy Waugh?” The voice is hesitant. “I’m, uh, I’m Quentin? I’m a friend of Julia, Barbara’s niece.”

 _Quentin_. Eliot’s never heard the name before, he rolls it over on his tongue silently and tries to hush the little pop of air when he gets to the T.

In the foyer, Mother is slowly opening the door again.

“Where’s Julia?” she asks, “Barbara said she was sick, so she would be sending Julia.”

“Julia’s sick, too,” Quentin says apologetically, “Yeah, just super sick, and um, she asked me to come instead. And I kind of owe her one, so -“

“Oh, fine, just come in,” Mother says, and she opens the door a little more to let Quentin in.

Quentin - Quentin is small, taller than Mother but not by much. He has big eyes and brown hair almost as long as Aunt Zelda’s, and his hands are nervously fidgeting on a bag slung over one shoulder. He’s wearing trousers, and Eliot feels frustrated suddenly, and he _wants_ \- and then his mother glances down the hallway and he shrinks back into the sitting room and closes the door.

—

When Eliot was very young, a man in a suit had come to the house and asked him a lot of questions about whether he liked going to school at home and if he had any friends, and did he ever get to play Outside?

Eliot didn’t know what half of those things were, and the other half he didn’t have any satisfactory answer for, so he’d run upstairs to hide under his bed from the man and his questions.

He’d stayed there as an argument had risen up from the first floor, the man and Mother and Aunt Zelda all shouting, hands over his ears, and just when he thought he would have to start shouting himself, to have some control over the sound, there’d been a great crash. Aunt Zelda had screamed, once. Then silence.

When he’d finally crept down the stairs after what felt like hours, the man was gone and his mother was sweeping the hallway carefully, methodically.

“Watch out for glass,” she’d said, and Eliot had nodded and gone to sit on the couch and watch Aunt Zelda as she sat and shook and stared at nothing. A film had played on the wall, and Eliot had ignored it as he looked for the thing that had broken. He never did find it.

—

After Quentin leaves to buy oysters, Eliot goes up to his room and sits crosslegged on his bed, thinking. He thinks about the damsel, waiting in the dungeon. He thinks about _The Secret Garden_ , the sun on Mary’s palm, the beautiful garden behind a wall, and he wants - he wishes - he just wonders what it would be like to go Outside. He wonders what it would be like to be a man. He wonders, and wishes, and eventually he begins to plan.

When Quentin returns, Eliot is hiding in a little room between the foyer and the sitting room. It smells like onions and dust, and it doesn’t have a light, so he’s just standing there in the gloom feeling nervous and a little silly.

It feels like hours of waiting, but finally there’s a hesitant knock on the door, and Mother hurries into the hall. She calls out a perfunctory “Who is it?” but she’s already unlocking the locks as Quentin says “Um, it’s Quentin?” through the door.

He stumbles through the door carrying a box that must have oysters in it; Mother pulls up the top to look inside and nods in approval.

“Let me get my purse,” she says, leaving Quentin to continue holding the box. His hair is half-covering his face and his fingers move on the box like he wants to brush the hair away, but can’t. Eliot watches him for a second longer than he should, trying to memorize the slow sweep of his eyes and the soft bow of his mouth, just in case his plan goes wrong. Then he takes a deep breath and -

Oh. He’d never actually figured out how to get Quentin’s attention and draw him back here. He looks around the little room frantically for something, eyes catching on a model ship, old photographs, a book, useless things, useless, foolish Eliot.

Then he sees it, forgotten in the foyer, right against the wall: his wooden car. It’s barely within his reach; he crouches down and draws it back with the tip of one finger, then pushes it towards Quentin.

It races down the hallway, faster than it should, faster than Eliot’s ever gotten it to go, and collides with Quentin’s foot. Then it moves back down the hall, propelled by the force of the collision.

“Ow, what the hell!” Quentin says, almost dropping the box of oysters. He looks down, confused, and watches as the car moves backwards, back to Eliot, who is confused, and delighted, and half-sure that this is _him_ making the car move. He thinks _stop_ at it, and it doesn’t for a few more seconds, but then it rolls to a halt. He smiles at it and looks back up at Quentin, who is peering down the hall.

“Is someone there?” Quentin asks, setting the box of oysters down on a foyer table and walking down the hallway very slowly. “Is - Are you being creepy on purpose?”

Eliot takes another deep breath and stands up, taking a step out of the room towards Quentin, stopping in the doorway.

“Have - have you ever been to the seven seas?” he asks, ignoring Quentin’s surprised flinch.

It’s not what he meant to say, but he doesn’t know what people say at first, not really.

“Uh,” says Quentin, eyes wide, “Not all of them. Are you - who are you?”

“I’m Eliot,” Eliot says. “I live here. This is my grandfather’s house.”

He gestures at a portrait of Grandfather on the wall, one of many. Quentin peers at it in, surprisingly, recognition.

“Your grandfather was Henry Waugh?” he asks in disbelief. “Like, the silent film director from the 20s?”

“Yes. It’s his dinner tonight. We’re having Oysters Rockefeller and watching his films because he killed himself fifty years ago tonight,” Eliot says, and then, remembering the plan, “What’s it like?”

“What’s what like?” Quentin asks. He looks confused but not - not terrified, not like the damsel when the villain took her.

“Outside. What is it like? I’m not allowed to go, but -“ he stops, shoulders curling up, confesses, “I want to.”

“You’ve never gone outside?” Quentin repeats, horrified, and Eliot tries to straighten his shoulders, but he feels ashamed.

“Listen,” Quentin says, taking a step towards him, “I think we should get out of here-“

And then Eliot’s mother comes back out into the hallway.

—

“You!” she says venomously at Quentin, “Get away from him!”

Eliot is frozen for a moment, watching her walk towards them. She has two crisp bills in one hand, and a red glass vase from the kitchen in the other. He sees her grasp around its neck, fingers whitening at the joints, and remembers the crash and Aunt Zelda’s scream.

“How dare you come here and corrupt him,” she snarls, and Eliot finally unfreezes and moves, stepping in front of Quentin.

“Leave him alone,” he says, more bravely than he feels. He doesn’t know what he feels, just that he wants, and everything is swirling inside of him, all the colors of the world. The red glass vase in her hand. “He’s my hero.”

“Oh, um, that’s very nice of you,“ Quentin starts, and Eliot flaps a hand behind him, shushing Quentin.

“We’re leaving, Mother,” he announces. “We’re going outside to see the sun.”

“Eliot, you don’t know what it’s like out there,” his mother says, the edge of anger in her voice receding, replaced by pleading. “It’s too complicated, that’s why your grandfather -“

She stops abruptly as Eliot turns to the portrait of Grandfather that he’d shown Quentin, lifting it off of the wall and letting it fall facedown on the floor with a thud and a crunch of cracking glass. The vase slips from her hand a second later; unlike the photo it shatters magnificently on the wooden floor, shards of red flying everywhere. Eliot knows he should cover his face and turn away, can feel Quentin doing the same thing behind him, but he can’t. He wants to see the color, wants to know what it would look like in the sun.

Eliot’s mother watches with wide, resigned eyes as he reaches behind himself again, smiling when Quentin’s slightly sweaty hand meets his.

“We’re going outside,” he tells her, and then he pushes past his mother, pulling Quentin towards the door he’s not allowed to touch, and then through it, to a door he’s never seen before, and then -

And then the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](https://leguin.tumblr.com) (grad school/lesbian angst central, usually) and [dreamwidth](https://patrokla.dreamwidth.org/).


End file.
